Explore "Spring" by Madison Cawein on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
(After the German of Goethe, _Faust_, II)
When on the mountain tops ray-crowned Apollo / Turns his swift arrows, dart on glittering dart, / Let but a rock glint green, the wild goats follow / Glad-grazing shyly on each sparse-grown part.
Rolled into plunging torrents spring the fountains; / And slope and vale and meadowland grow green; / While on ridg'd levels of a hundred mountains, / Far fleece by fleece, the woolly flocks convene.
With measured stride, deliberate and steady, / The scattered cattle seek the beetling steep, / But shelter for th' assembled herd is ready / In many hollows that the walled rocks heap:
The lairs of Pan; and, lo, in murmuring places, / In bushy clefts, what woodland Nymphs arouse! / Where, full of yearning for the azure spaces, / Tree, crowding tree, lifts high its heavy boughs.
Old forests, where the gnarly oak stands regnant / Bristling with twigs that still repullulate, / And, swoln with spring, with sappy sweetness pregnant, / The maple blushes with its leafy weight.
And, mother-like, in cirques of quiet shadows, / Milk flows, warm milk, that keeps all things alive; / Fruit is not far, th' abundance of the meadows, / And honey oozes from the hollow hive.